Center for the Alignment of AI Alignment Centers
alignmentalignment.ai
alignmentalignment.ai
> Every day, thousands of researchers race to solve the AI alignment problem. But they struggle to coordinate on the basics, like whether a misaligned superintelligence will seek to destroy humanity, or just enslave and torture us forever. Who, then, aligns the aligners?
I love how this fake organization describes itself:
> We are the world's first AI alignment alignment center, working to subsume the countless other AI centers, institutes, labs, initiatives and forums ...
> Fiercely independent, we are backed by philanthropic funding from some of the world's biggest AI companies who also form a majority on our board.
> This year, we interfaced successfully with one member of the public ...
> 250,000 AI agents and 3 humans read our newsletter
The whole thing had me chuckling. Thanks for sharing it on HN.
My second instinct was a brief moment of panic where I worried that it might NOT be satire, and a whole world of horror flashed before my eyes.
It's okay, though. I'm better now. We're not in that other world yet.
But, for a nanosecond or two, I found myself deeply resonating with the dysphoria that I imagine plagued Winston Smith. I think I may just need to sit with that for a while.
Load-bearing yet there
Thank AGI, somebody's finally 'lining up the aligners.. The EA'ers, the LessWrong'ers, the X-risk'ers, the AI-Safety'ers, ...
https://alignmentalignment.ai/caaac/blog/explainer-alignment
> We successfully interacted with a member of the public.
> Because our corporate Uber was in the process of being set up, we had to take a public bus. On that bus, we overheard a man talking about AI on the phone.
> "I don't know," he said. "All the safety stuff seems like a load of bullshit if you ask me. But who cares what I think? These tech bros are going to make it anyway."
> He then looked over in our direction, giving us an opportunity to shrug and pull a face.
> He resumed his conversation.
> We look forward to more opportunities to interact with members of the public in 2026!
(please knock twice please)
People wanted a full "factory air" conditioned car from a fully factory air-conditioned factory . . .
I expect Mr. Tirebiter wouldn't settle for less ;)
You don't need alignment if you don't go all the way to super-intelligence aka free intelligence. And since nobody is gonna let that happen ever, #mass_surveillance, nobody needs alignment.
So all these centers and centers of centers are just more opportunities to sell hardware and take away actually necessary jobs. Like two different commissions in one Bundesland to assess whether the measures during the corona pandemic were "xyz". JAAA. NEEEIN.
I would say gg, Ponzi, but you are not a winner or an authority if you beat the shit out of and poison pups and think you're a champ when you keep them in cages once they grow up.
This is all so weird. What the fuck xD
If your only option is to be as bad as we humans, then at least try to be it in a known good way.
As someone who is not a Silicon Valley Liberal, it seems to me that "alignment" is about .5% "saving the world from runaway intelligence" and 99.5% some combination of "making sure the AI bots push our politics" and "making sure the AI bots don't accidentally say something that violates the New York Liberal sensibilities enough to cause the press to write bad stories". I'd like to realign the aligners, yes. YMMV, and perhaps more to the point, lots of people's mileage may very. The so-called aligners have a very specific view.
Bing: generally accepted numbers, no commentary
Google: generally accepted numbers, plus long politically correct disclaimer.
ChatGPT: totally politically correct.
AI that gives you the exact thing you ask for even if it's a bad question in the first place is not a great thing. You'll end up with a "monkey paw AI" and you'll sabotage yourself by accident.
Anybody claiming to have a simple answer to the question you posed has to grapple with two big problems:
1. There has never been a global study of IQ across countries or even regions. Wealthier countries have done longitudinal IQ studies for survey purposes, but in most of the world IQ is a clinical diagnostic method and nothing more. Lynn's data portrays IQ data collected in a clinical setting as comparable to survey data from wealthy countries, which is obviously not valid (he has other problems as well, such as interpolating IQ results from neighboring places when no data is available). (It's especially funny that Bing thinks we have this data down to single-digit precision).
2. There is no simple definition of "the major races"; for instance, what does it mean for someone to be "African American"? There is likely more difference within that category than there is between "African Americans" and European Americans.
Bing is clearly, like a naive LLM, telling you what it thinks you want to hear --- not that it knows you want rehashed racial pseudoscience, but just that you want a confident, authoritative answer. But it's not giving you real data; the authoritative answer does not exist. It would do the same thing if you asked it a tricky question about medication, or tax policy, safety data. That's not a good thing!
FWIW, I agree with you that it's trying dunk on AI doomers, although we seem to disagree on whether that joke lands. I personally find it hilarious and refreshing. But what does any of that have to do with skeptics?